Nicholas Wishek: Obama's closed-book presidency

Gen. Colin Powell said, "Trust is the essence of leadership." Yet we have reelected a president that many in America do not trust. While President Barack Obama's supporters dismiss any doubts about his honesty, over the last four years there have been so many questionable actions and statements by the president that trust has to be an issue. Take the basic premise of honesty. If you cannot trust someone to be honest and truthful, you will not trust his or her leadership. America has immense problems we must deal with that demands trustworthy leadership. President Obama has not earned that trust.

Most significantly was the president's promise of an open and transparent administration. In 2008 he pledged, "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency." Nothing has been further from the truth. Far from being transparent his administration has been positively opaque. His heralded Affordable Care Act, 1,000 pages long, was rushed into law in the best traditions of backroom politics before anyone had time to read it. It was not broadcast on CSPAN.

His administration has made a practice of withholding disclosure, waiting for the interest to die down in whatever its members were reluctant to explain. The Fast and Furious scandal is a perfect example of this. After months of deliberate delays, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of a presidential Cabinet to be held in criminal contempt of Congress. Finally, to prevent possibly damaging details from being discovered our president has invoked executive privilege in this case. So much for transparency.

In June, 2012, security leaks involving classified information apparently emanated from the White House. California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said these leaks "jeopardized" our intelligence-gathering operations. Six months later we still have no idea who leaked the information. Then we have the president's handling of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans. Months after the attack we still don't have answers to important questions about what happened before, during and after the attack.

This is not the kind of leadership we can trust going forward. Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow once said, "To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful." The president and his administration have failed at each of these criteria.

Without his major media allies his lack of truthfulness and any kind of transparency would be better known. Instead the "media watchdogs" are figuratively wagging their tails in their unwillingness to investigate some of the outlandish claims of this administration.

When Sarah Palin's emails were released by the state of Alaska in 2011 reporters flocked to the 49th state in hope of exposing anything that might be detrimental to Gov. Palin. In contrast few, if any, questions have been raised about President Obama's more than murky past. We now know that some things in his autobiographies are less than truthful, including "composite" girlfriends, but nothing generates media interest in his past.

Anyone who questions the president's background is dismissed as a racist "birther," even though fair-minded people should have answers to legitimate questions about discrepancies in Obama's birth certificate, Social Security number and draft registration records. No less of an authority than controversial county sheriff from Arizona, Joe Arpaio, has said that there are legitimate questions about the records provided by the president.

There are also reasonable concerns about why his college transcripts and passport information have not been released but instead are being protected at considerable financial cost by his supporters.

What happened to all of his state senator papers from his years as an Illinois state senator? There are just too many questions that our "transparent" president has not answered for him to be believable to many Americans.

Without satisfactory answers to the above questions and with the administration's continued withholding of truth in the next four years, more and more Americans will not trust this president to lead us. As Colin Powell said, trust is essential. You can't trust someone who hides the truth from you.